Month: June 2008

Twitter has come under attack for being a great service that has a poor record of up time Link1 – TechCrunch, Link 2 – TechCrunch. Well news on the street is Twitter survived the several thousand posts it recieved during WWDC, including my own meager posts. But at what cost.

I laughingly joked that the next feature for twitter to disable to ensure it stayed up, was to turn off twittering. In reality it was nearly at that point the following features were cut for the duration of the Keynote:

@ Replies

Everyone Tab

Archive Tab

Public Timeline

Limit number of API requests from 30 Request Per Hour to 10

Updates by SMS

User Deletion and Restoration

It seems to me that the vast majority of the functionality of twitter was culled to ensure uptime, the community was just lobotomised with no thought. I applaud twitter for staying online, but it shouldn’t have cost the features that make Twitter, Twitter and not just some meta-blogging platform.

Twitter has got plenty of issues with scaling, if anything WWDC has proved that twitter cannot scale with demand. To use a analogy, a TV station does not cut the commentary of a football match because the system cannot cope with the demand, this is essentially what Twitter did to the community.

It looks like we were spot-on with our estimate of ten times the normal traffic today. Our preparations held and Twitter stayed up! Only one unexpected disruption occured and that was a network problem in our data center which caused a few minutes of service distruption some time after Steve Jobs’ keynote. With that single distruption, our uptime during the event was 97.3%

WWDC was a bit of a let down, iphone alleys’ coverage by ustream however was fantastic. I was expecting more information and more products, not a grueling 45mins of demo’s of apps we cant use for a month, not quite the usual Apple finesse we have come to appreciate.

One important thing to note was Steve Job’s committed to pricing the new 8gb iPhone at no more that $199US in all 70 countries the iPhone 3g will be sold in by the end of the year. I hope this is the signal of a much bigger push by Apple to price equivalently in all countries. That said they create products people will gladly pay for in some cases even twice such as myself who will be upgrading come July 11th once again.

Surprisingly the announcement of OS X 10.6 dubbed Snow Leopard was pushed from the forefront of the announcement, giving credence to the fact it will not be a stability release just a fit and polish release to keep ahead of the competition. Also .mac will be no longer and be replaced by mobile me, which has to be an improvement of the aging .mac name and technology.

It was a bit of a let down in the fact that Steve had very little stage time, some reported as usually steve looked ill.

Hoping to capitalise on its impressive iPlayer service the Beeb has decided why not go back to the 90’s and try something they know doesn’t work.

People simply do not want to watch TV in a linear sense anymore, the only content thats worth streaming are sports events, I there isn’t much chance of that happening soon.

The BBC needs to work on iPlayer and getting the BBC online identity sorted out, its abit of a mish mash at the moment. With iPlayer the BBC struck gold and unless they keep pushing they will become a follower not a leader. I think the best idea would be to can live streaming, and just make iPlayer better they would be forgiven for that.

It was less then 30 minutes after the official word that iTunes was selling films in the UK store, before I was watching Batman Begins. But is the convenience coming at too high a cost?

In the UK we have become used getting ripped off around every corner, it stinks but we are British so we put up with it. My problem is that some of the films now available particularly Al Gores documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” £10.99 At this point the noveltywore off, I can have this shipped to me from amazon £6.22 in less than two days.

I aren’t apposed to paying £6.99 for a film, but £10.99 for a film that you can buy in the shops for less than £7 I think its pushing it. Us Brits whilst being hard done by after getting the long of the stick for so many years we have all become cynics, and easily see where profiteering is taking place. We saw it with the iPhone, which didn’t do anywhere near as well as planned (see here) We also see it with practically every computer or gadget, when you get nearly 2$US to £1GBP and the prices of things are the same in dollars as pounds you know there is something wrong.

Unless iTunes get more content up in the store and stop stupid pricing, they may just take off. Who am I kidding it will take off whatever apple do, its what their good at. I would like to think that Apple at least get some semblance of order in pricing and price match with the High Street.